Dingo
Nov 10 2002, 08:39 AM
This is only a section from a much longer article. I found it fascinating.
Building a Bridge: Trusting Ourselves
to Know How to Work and Live Together
Ratcliffe: Fascinating. One last item (we have about 20 minutes here), is the story you told me on the first day I arrived which I found so fascinating of yourself in a class of young officers and this assignment you were given to build a bridge. I'd like you to recount that for us now.
Prouty: It has interested me for many decades, this idea of politics, and this idea of leadership that is thrust upon us, and whether or not this idea is the same as actual human experience and understanding of true leadership. If people are stranded on a desert island, they don't hold an election. They suddenly realize a certain person has a little more experience, a little more gift than the others and they follow him.
The armies of the world are traditionally pretty well trained, pretty well disciplined. Before World War II we saw in the U.S. Army certain things that I'm afraid we don't see today. It got diluted in the great mass movements of World War II and since. But there were people there who tried to impress this previous understanding upon those of us who had been called in before World War II -- when the Army was small. I think the military forces of the U.S. before World War II were about 116,000 if I remember -- and when you figure that 10 million men were flown to Vietnam during the Vietnam War and at any one time we had as many 550,000 you can see what I am talking about.
115,000 in the Armed Forces were not many people. But they were very skilled. And when a new officer, regardless of age, rank or so on, was assigned to a division, the Army had a custom of division officer training. And this division officer training was rather unique as we look back today. Although you'll find such training at Harvard Business School or other places where men are taught how to govern, how to lead people, and so on, how to run a business.
One of the events I have never forgotten because it was so effective, it was just absolutely effective and what we saw deeply impressed us, was that after this group of about 60 men had been together for a week or so, listening to lectures from some of the old time colonels and sergeants and warrant officers, one of the courses they taught us rather superficially, but very interesting, was how to put together a trestle bridge.
In those days, a trestle bridge in the army was all prefabricated including the posts that hold it up, the pilings at the side of the river to hold it up, and the planks on the top, and how they all fit together. The bolts and the nuts and the whole structure was prefabricated but it had to be put together precisely, or it wouldn't work. And every brook or river isn't the same width so you had to be able to lengthen the bridge and sometimes the banks were higher than others so you had to raise the bridge. The bridge could do that -- the prefab's structure was such that it would accomplish that.
There was about a week of courses on the trestle bridge where most of it was taught on paper. Every once in a while they would take us out to a shed and show us the pieces that it consisted of, but we had never worked on it, we just knew what was what. One evening just before sundown, they picked up the whole class, about 60 men, piled us into a couple of army buses and began driving us somewhere without saying where we were going. We had no idea what we were going to do. And they drove us, and drove us (their only objective was to wait until it was dark) and finally stopped in the countryside somewhere beside a rather large field.
We all got out of the buses and a sergeant said, "Gentlemen, your exercise for the evening lies in that field. Its a trestle bridge." We were all with an armored division. He said, "there are two tanks in the field. You are going to build that trestle bridge across a river that is on the other side of this field. You are going to drive the tanks across that bridge and your dinner for the evening is over there, on the other side of the river. You are not to swim over and get dinner. You won't have dinner unless you drive the tanks across the trestle bridge." Then he said, "Now I have one more request. Any of you people that smoke, I want you to give me your matches and your cigarette lighters. You are to have no flashlights. Hand it all in right now." And he collected everything. He said, "Anybody who wants to light up a cigarette, come see me."
Then he sat down quietly with another sergeant and never said another word. He didn't say who was in charge. He didn't say anything. He just walked off. So there was 60 people standing by the side of the road, and he had mentioned "trestle bridge," so some of us went out into the grass and sure enough we stumbled over a couple of pieces here, and a couple of pieces there. They were very neatly packed up, there was no problem with that. And a few others walked over to see what the river looked like and it would be my estimate that it was about 40 feet across, something like that, and the banks were 7 or 8 feet on either side. We could see a bonfire on the other side and a tent was pitched so we knew that our dinner was over there.
Nothing happened very quickly except a little commotion. People talking to each other, "But how do we get this bridge out there?" Then finally 3 or 4 men who knew each other said, "Hey, well at least we got to get this stuff over to the river. Let's start carrying it over there." And another group said, "Well we'll carry these things over there." And gradually some action just sort of came.
But then from among the group, all of a sudden one man began to say, "Look, when you're carrying this over, put this here because this is the piling for the beginning of the bridge." And then, "Look, you 5 fellers swim across and we'll get the other piling over to you by" -- the river wasn't all that deep and you could carry it over there -- "but you get on the other side and work over there while we're working on this side." And finally one man was just saying to each group, "Okay, put it here, do this, let's do this."
Everybody was cooperating beautifully. There was no problem and in an unbelievably short time we had actually got that bridge across the river. We had men beginning to lay the planks on the top, and the cross beams that hold those planks, and the bolts to tighten them down. And gradually we started walking across it with men carrying the planks and the bridge held them up fine.
Once we got the planks down more men started going across with other things and finally this man who had been more or less leading these just nondescript people -- there were chaplains there, there were doctors, we weren't engineers, in fact there wasn't an engineer in the crowd -- finally said, "Well let's take a look at the strength of this thing." So we all stood on one side, it didn't tip, we all went to one end, it didn't tip. We all walked around using our weight to try to decide. We knew tanks were very heavy.
Finally we said okay. It took one man to drive a tank but there was a place for another man to handle the radio and things like that (which you'd ordinarily call the gunner), and we used a third man in the turret to direct the tank because the people inside can't see very much. So we got two crews of 3 men who could handle the tanks. The first crew drove the first one around and with great care we aimed the first tank across the bridge and it went. Nothing happened. The second crew took the second tank, drove it across, and all the rest of the fellows went over with it and we had an absolutely magnificent dinner.
The next day in class the old colonel that was running this school came in and he said, `Gentlemen, I want to tell you something about yesterday's exercise.' He said, people have lived in communities ever since the dawn of time. They never had an election, they never had politics, they never had a religious hierarchy. What they had was themselves, usually the elder led the village because he obviously had experience. If he had been disabled or if he wasn't quite as bright as others, they could push him aside, but usually the elder led the community and he would get things done. But if it came time to go on the hunt and the village was hungry and they really needed some animals, some food, a certain group would break off and among that group they knew who was the best hunter, they knew who was the best tracker, they didn't stop and have an election. There was no boy scout captain, there was no election, they just did the job. The women the same way. Some women could build the houses better than others or some could make cloth better than others.
And he said, that's the way communities -- that's the way armies -- really run. He said the group will find its leader inevitably. He said sometimes when an army is in a terrible battle, and the colonel has been killed and the major has been killed, probably a sergeant will get up and say, Follow me. After citing examples of this from history he said, Gentlemen, what we did yesterday was to prove to you that an absolutely nondescript, untrained group will follow that fact without any agreement, without any election, without any assignment. We didn't assign the leader, we didn't ask you to elect the leader, we didn't say that so and so was an engineer and he has the experience. We left you in the dark and told you come over there and have dinner with us. He said, `Don't ever forget that because military organizations as well as ordinary civil organizations follow those rules. The other rules are more or less applied to our society but these are the basic rules. You need to know that in a war.'
I have never been through a class that had quite the impact on me as that one did and I guess not reluctantly but it did surprise me as I was the officer that led the group across the bridge. Simply because I said to these people who were already beginning to go, Let's put it here and then let's do this, and the group wanted some kind of instruction.
I would gladly have yielded to somebody else, but it wasn't necessary. The bridge got built. I think as I look back at it that much of the problem we have in society is that we don't trust ourselves. The people we elect are most likely not the people that can do the job anyway. Or the people that we might even follow as to quote religious leaders, don't necessarily know all the things that are best for us.
As Buckminster Fuller says the two most powerfully disruptive forces in mankind are politics and religion. Now he doesn't mean politics as I have described it in the village, and he doesn't mean religion as in the basic facts of religion. He means these structured systems we call politics and call religion that really are a form of mind control. In this century I think that as much effort has been applied in certain areas of our leadership to gain mind control over the people of the world as they have over any other kind of control. I think that the very history of an organization we call the British Society of Psychic Research (and its very strong American offshoot) is evidence of the fact that today people are not asked to think. They are told what to think, whether it makes sense or not. I think this is a most fundamental fact of our life today.